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Lidia Yuknavitch (author of The Chronology of Water, pictured above) and Vanessa Veselka (author of Zazen) had a conversation for The Believer on the subject of writing angry female characters. Part 1.  VANESSA VESELKA: Mary Shelley is interesting because she chooses to put the violent territories of her psyche in, not only a male body, but a potpourri of graveyard finds. Do you think that distance from the female body give her the freedom to write Frankenstein?  LIDIA YUKNAVITCH: I’ve always connected Shelley’s story of Frankenstein to her mother’s feminism and death and her own experiences with childbirth and childdeath and fears around reproduction, so I don’t read the monster in Frankensteinas an archetypal male. I read it as something of a third term in gender. VV: But in general, I think you would agree the terrain afforded a man regarding anger and horror is far more complex, and that Shelley takes advantage of that. Art is created through tension, and the stereotypes that exist offer plenty of opportunities for tension. If we choose to consciously ‘play against type’ as writers, does that mean we, as women, actually have an artistic edge in writing about rage?  LY: Yeah, I think we do have an edge in terms of creating, but not in terms of the market. Like, I have an unfinished book based on Eve’s rage: where’d it go? when she was informed she’d fucked humanity with original sin. VV: One of the things I had to fight in writing Zazen was eroticizing Della’s rage. I remember telling my agent—who didn’t stick around—that I wasn’t writing the Laura Tomb Raider version of Della. There’s this adolescent boy desire for a female superhero, something like Thor with boobs—but I wasn’t feeling the need.  LY: The agent who almost liked me told me to take out the violence in my memoir. My answer was: then who the hell’s story am I telling?  VV: I wish I had an organizational strategy to have artists ‘occupy’ the market and its structures, but I left union organizing because I couldn’t take the hate any longer. The truth is, I can’t handle my own rage. So while I’m bitching about how the world isn’t ready for representations of angry women, I have to admit that I’m not ready for it. LY: Yeah I know. I feel that way, too. Somewhere along the line I gave up on the “occupy the market” energy. I scratch at it from its edges but that’s pretty impotent. However, what I can do is write it. I can print it when other people write it. I can get it into the hands of other people. I can teach it. The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production of workers. It’s like that Adrienne Rich quote: “The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.”

Lidia Yuknavitch (author of The Chronology of Water, pictured above) and Vanessa Veselka (author of Zazen) had a conversation for The Believer on the subject of writing angry female characters. Part 1. 

VANESSA VESELKA: Mary Shelley is interesting because she chooses to put the violent territories of her psyche in, not only a male body, but a potpourri of graveyard finds. Do you think that distance from the female body give her the freedom to write Frankenstein? 

LIDIA YUKNAVITCH: I’ve always connected Shelley’s story of Frankenstein to her mother’s feminism and death and her own experiences with childbirth and childdeath and fears around reproduction, so I don’t read the monster in Frankensteinas an archetypal male. I read it as something of a third term in gender.

VV: But in general, I think you would agree the terrain afforded a man regarding anger and horror is far more complex, and that Shelley takes advantage of that. Art is created through tension, and the stereotypes that exist offer plenty of opportunities for tension. If we choose to consciously ‘play against type’ as writers, does that mean we, as women, actually have an artistic edge in writing about rage? 

LY: Yeah, I think we do have an edge in terms of creating, but not in terms of the market. Like, I have an unfinished book based on Eve’s rage: where’d it go? when she was informed she’d fucked humanity with original sin.

VV: One of the things I had to fight in writing Zazen was eroticizing Della’s rage. I remember telling my agent—who didn’t stick around—that I wasn’t writing the Laura Tomb Raider version of Della. There’s this adolescent boy desire for a female superhero, something like Thor with boobs—but I wasn’t feeling the need. 

LY: The agent who almost liked me told me to take out the violence in my memoir. My answer was: then who the hell’s story am I telling? 

VV: I wish I had an organizational strategy to have artists ‘occupy’ the market and its structures, but I left union organizing because I couldn’t take the hate any longer. The truth is, I can’t handle my own rage. So while I’m bitching about how the world isn’t ready for representations of angry women, I have to admit that I’m not ready for it.

LY: Yeah I know. I feel that way, too. Somewhere along the line I gave up on the “occupy the market” energy. I scratch at it from its edges but that’s pretty impotent. However, what I can do is write it. I can print it when other people write it. I can get it into the hands of other people. I can teach it. The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production of workers. It’s like that Adrienne Rich quote: “The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.”

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“Each painting is its own world, but a lot of times I do see the paintings as one page from a story. You can imagine what has happened before or after. Sometimes they are worded as being a part of a story, especially the paintings where characters are in conversation.”  - Neil Farber “Back when we were a larger group, we’d sometimes write a title or text first, as a setup for others to respond to. That doesn’t happen anymore.” - Michael Dumontier Novelist Lee Henderson interviews Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier, founding members of the artist collective, The Royal Art Lodge, based out of Winnipeg. They recently released a book with Drawn & Quarterly called Constructive Abandonment. Read the full interview »

“Each painting is its own world, but a lot of times I do see the paintings as one page from a story. You can imagine what has happened before or after. Sometimes they are worded as being a part of a story, especially the paintings where characters are in conversation.”  - Neil Farber

“Back when we were a larger group, we’d sometimes write a title or text first, as a setup for others to respond to. That doesn’t happen anymore.” - Michael Dumontier

Novelist Lee Henderson interviews Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier, founding members of the artist collective, The Royal Art Lodge, based out of Winnipeg. They recently released a book with Drawn & Quarterly called Constructive Abandonment.

Read the full interview »

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Joan Didion talks about gaining confidence, and about her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. Next week, the entire interview will be published on The Believer website. Excerpt 1, and Excerpt 2 are here. We spoke over the phone, she from her hotel in Washington, on book tour for Blue Nights. — Sheila Heti BLVR: I imagine it’s difficult to write non-fiction because you have to have such authority to say, This is what the world is. How can you really have the authority to say, I know enough and I’ve seen enough to be able to conclude things about the world? JD: Well, you have to just gain that confidence, which is part of what you do over the course of your whole career. I mean, you become confident that you have—this sounds ridiculous, but you become confident that you have the answer. BLVR: Do you remember the point— JD: —at which you get that confidence? BLVR: Well, for you. JD: For me it probably occurred fairly late, when I started getting feedback from the audience. Feedback in terms of a response. Well, it wasn’t fairly late. It was fairly early [laughs] when I started getting a response from the audience, otherwise I wouldn’t have had the nerve to continue. BLVR: Where would you situate that? Around which book? JD: I would say it happened at Play It As It Lays. Which was, when? My third book. I remember my husband saying, when Play It As It Lays was about to come out, he said, This isn’t going to—you’re never going to—you’re never going to—this book isn’t going to make it.  BLVR: Did it hurt your feelings when he said that? JD: No, it didn’t hurt my feelings. It was, I thought, a realistic assessment, which I certainly agreed with. BLVR: Why did you both feel like it wasn’t going to make it? JD: Because it was my third book and I had not made it until then. And you don’t see—I mean, you don’t think in terms of suddenly making it. You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you’re writing, and if it doesn’t seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can’t imagine that moment when it suddenly will.

Joan Didion talks about gaining confidence, and about her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. Next week, the entire interview will be published on The Believer website. Excerpt 1, and Excerpt 2 are here. We spoke over the phone, she from her hotel in Washington, on book tour for Blue Nights.

— Sheila Heti

BLVR: I imagine it’s difficult to write non-fiction because you have to have such authority to say, This is what the world is. How can you really have the authority to say, I know enough and I’ve seen enough to be able to conclude things about the world?

JD: Well, you have to just gain that confidence, which is part of what you do over the course of your whole career. I mean, you become confident that you have—this sounds ridiculous, but you become confident that you have the answer.

BLVR: Do you remember the point—

JD: —at which you get that confidence?

BLVR: Well, for you.

JD: For me it probably occurred fairly late, when I started getting feedback from the audience. Feedback in terms of a response. Well, it wasn’t fairly late. It was fairly early [laughs] when I started getting a response from the audience, otherwise I wouldn’t have had the nerve to continue.

BLVR: Where would you situate that? Around which book?

JD: I would say it happened at Play It As It Lays. Which was, when? My third book. I remember my husband saying, when Play It As It Lays was about to come out, he said, This isn’t going to—you’re never going to—you’re never going to—this book isn’t going to make it. 

BLVR: Did it hurt your feelings when he said that?

JD: No, it didn’t hurt my feelings. It was, I thought, a realistic assessment, which I certainly agreed with.

BLVR: Why did you both feel like it wasn’t going to make it?

JD: Because it was my third book and I had not made it until then. And you don’t see—I mean, you don’t think in terms of suddenly making it. You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you’re writing, and if it doesn’t seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can’t imagine that moment when it suddenly will.

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An excerpt from our online exclusive conversation between Douglas Rushkoff and Genesis P-Orridge. DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: Maybe we should start at the beginning, for those who might have no idea what Pandrogeny is about. I mean, you have big breasts and wear women’s clothing. What’s the difference between Pandrogeny and transvestism or transgender? GENESIS BREYER P‑ORRIDGE: Well, the main difference is that Pandrogeny is not about gender, it’s about union. The union of opposites. One way to explain the difference is very easy: with transgender people the man might feel that he’s trapped—the person feels they’re a man trapped in a woman’s body, or a woman trapped in a man’s body—whereas in Pandrogeny you’re just trapped in the body. So Pandrogeny is very much about the union of opposites, and, through that reunion, the transcendence of this binary world and this illusory, polarized social system. DR: Doesn’t that happen in sex, anyway? GO: Of course, the orgasm. When people have an orgasm together that’s a moment of Pandrogeny. And when people have a baby, the baby is pandrogynous, sexually. Because it is literally two people becoming one. DR: So then these memes—this ability to transcend polarity and gender— are already at our disposal. Why do it the way you are, through surgeries and implants and all this medical activity, all the social challenges of getting into the ladies’ room as a pandrogene? How do the literal cutting and pasting of gender traits dissolve these polarities any more than they underscore them? GO: Well, as you know, it went in steps. In the beginning it was very much romantic. Jaye and I decided we didn’t want to have children. But we still got that urge to blend, to merge and become one. I think the heart of a lot of the romance in couples, whatever kind of couple they are, is that they want to both just be each other, to consume each other with passion. So we wanted to represent that. First we did it by dressing alike. Then we started to do minor alterations to our bodies. Then we decided that we would try as hard as we could to actually look like each other in order to strengthen and solidify that urge. So it was initially a very self-centered thing to do. But once we started to think about it, we realized that it was a bit like William Burroughs and Brion Gysin in The Third Mind, where they said the two of them together would no longer be the writer of the piece; it’s the two things cut up and being reassembled. That was the product of The Third Mind—the cutups. We thought if we used each other as separate artists, or individuals, and we cut ourselves up, maybe we could create a third entity, which is the pandrogene. So that’s very much the third being, a new state of being. Burroughs always used to talk to me about how you short-circuit control. And Jaye and I talked a very long time about that. And we decided that DNA was very much the recording—the tool of control. Perhaps even DNA is a parasite and we’re just the vessels at its disposal. Read the full interview. »

An excerpt from our online exclusive conversation between Douglas Rushkoff and Genesis P-Orridge.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: Maybe we should start at the beginning, for those who might have no idea what Pandrogeny is about. I mean, you have big breasts and wear women’s clothing. What’s the difference between Pandrogeny and transvestism or transgender?

GENESIS BREYER P‑ORRIDGE: Well, the main difference is that Pandrogeny is not about gender, it’s about union. The union of opposites. One way to explain the difference is very easy: with transgender people the man might feel that he’s trapped—the person feels they’re a man trapped in a woman’s body, or a woman trapped in a man’s body—whereas in Pandrogeny you’re just trapped in the body. So Pandrogeny is very much about the union of opposites, and, through that reunion, the transcendence of this binary world and this illusory, polarized social system.

DR: Doesn’t that happen in sex, anyway?

GO: Of course, the orgasm. When people have an orgasm together that’s a moment of Pandrogeny. And when people have a baby, the baby is pandrogynous, sexually. Because it is literally two people becoming one.

DR: So then these memes—this ability to transcend polarity and gender— are already at our disposal. Why do it the way you are, through surgeries and implants and all this medical activity, all the social challenges of getting into the ladies’ room as a pandrogene? How do the literal cutting and pasting of gender traits dissolve these polarities any more than they underscore them?

GO: Well, as you know, it went in steps. In the beginning it was very much romantic. Jaye and I decided we didn’t want to have children. But we still got that urge to blend, to merge and become one. I think the heart of a lot of the romance in couples, whatever kind of couple they are, is that they want to both just be each other, to consume each other with passion. So we wanted to represent that. First we did it by dressing alike. Then we started to do minor alterations to our bodies. Then we decided that we would try as hard as we could to actually look like each other in order to strengthen and solidify that urge. So it was initially a very self-centered thing to do. But once we started to think about it, we realized that it was a bit like William Burroughs and Brion Gysin in The Third Mind, where they said the two of them together would no longer be the writer of the piece; it’s the two things cut up and being reassembled. That was the product of The Third Mind—the cutups. We thought if we used each other as separate artists, or individuals, and we cut ourselves up, maybe we could create a third entity, which is the pandrogene. So that’s very much the third being, a new state of being. Burroughs always used to talk to me about how you short-circuit control. And Jaye and I talked a very long time about that. And we decided that DNA was very much the recording—the tool of control. Perhaps even DNA is a parasite and we’re just the vessels at its disposal.

Read the full interview. »